In an interview with the teen fashion magazine Marie Claire, actress Mindy Kaling said paying to have her eggs frozen is the perfect gift for a co-ed home from college.

“I wish every 19-year-old girl would come home from college and that the gift… instead of buying them jewelry or a vacation or whatever — is that their parents would take them to freeze their eggs… They could do this once and have all of these eggs for them, for their futures.”

Kaling had two children this way in her late 30s and rhapsodizes about the process: “It was the best part of my life.”

“This is absolutely appalling — perhaps the worst advice ever,” said Ruth Institute President Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D., of  Kaling recommending young women have their eggs frozen. “It’s wrong on so many levels.”

Morse noted: “As Naomi Schaefer Riley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in the Deseret News, Kaling forgot a few salient details. The procedure is iffy at best. According to the Centers for Disease Control, only about a fifth of these painful and expensive procedures actually result in a live birth. Other sources put the odds at closer to 11%.”

“And that’s not the worst of it,” Morse continued. “It takes the father completely out of the picture. It makes single-parenting the ideal. It overlooks the reality that children raised by single parents are more likely to exhibit any number of social pathologies, from addiction to mental health issues.”

“At best, you have children raised without a father’s love and direction. At worse, you have another human tragedy. Is it fair to the child? Of course not, but in these situations, it’s all about adult desires. Children are a sideline to their story.”

“The best advice you can give a 19-year-old woman is to take her time and make the effort to find the type of man she will want to marry and have children with,” Morse urged.

“But, of course, in a teen fashion magazine, you wouldn’t find such ‘uncool’ advice.”

The above comes from an August 27 posting on The Stream.